My review of DAYSWORK by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

                      REVIEW of DAYSWORK

        Early in September 2023, when I was preparing to celebrate being alive a year after heart surgery, I saw my name in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the  New York Sun. These were not advance notices of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings, oh no. These were reviews of a book, “a novel” (it says on the cover), Dayswork, by a married couple. It was not a novel. It was not fiction. It was an account of the couple’s erratically but persistently acquiring information about Herman Melville through the Internet during and after the lockdown for Covid. Recurrent characters are recognizable as real people. Melville and some of his family are real. Many pages are devoted to three modern people, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and me, called not by name but “The Biographer” throughout while Hardwick and other biographers are lower-case. They portray me often enough to give a sense of my working life and (several times) a distorted sense of me as misogynist. On the last page the couple, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, recognize “the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable.” They had been invasive, indecently so a time or two, when I must, once, have spoken or written unguardedly, and revealed something I should not have told anyone. I began to regard the book as a fragmented shorthand tour of my career.

        It was hard to read the pages of Dayswork without correcting or supplementing them. Helen Vendler read Clarel the first time in 1976 before coming to Pittsfield, where after my speech a Hawthorne worshipper exploded at me, purple faced and foaming at the mouth—a public paroxysm. Her companion told me what Helen said during the man’s frenzy. That would have been a story! The authors print my cool critique of the great Harvard would-be biographer Harry Murray. They started the story, and I am tempted but will never tell what Murray confided to the late Brian Higgins at New Bedford in 1980. It’s strange to know “the rest” of many stories the couple were telling--and many more stories they did not know. All this made for a very odd retrospection of my career during the weeks Alma and I were polishing up the last chapters of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.

        They put me in Daywork just turned twenty, a tubercular, released from a sanitorium but isolated by state’s decree and recumbent for another five months, during which I read Shakespeare’s plays over and over. The authors say, accurately, that I remember reading for these months as “a great adventure.” They jump over some years, but bit by bit they print mainly accurate scenes from my later decades. I wince at the worst invasions and the times when the novelists reflexively slide into misandry. Elizabeth Hardwick made me her partner in a false claim about Melville’s sexuality. I walked over to check Hardwick’s lower-case biography of Melville only to find it gone, in Pittsfield now. I wince at being reproached for changing “scared white doe” to “sacred white doe” in the Mosses essay. How could I know better than Mrs. Melville, the copyist? Well, partly because I knew the context was lofty, and Wordsworthian, and I knew Melville’s handwriting which his wife was copying. Scott Norsworthy even more tellingly shows that Melville was thinking of Dryden’s hind right then, too, in a correction he made in Mrs. Melville’s transcription. He also puts “sacred white doe” into a thick context of Berkshire stories. Melville wrote “sacred white doe.” 

    Everyone can say misogyny. Dayswork made me learn to say misandry. How easy it is to be flippant toward people who know what they are doing but don’t stop and take 25 pages to show how they know, the way I know what Melville did when he got to Boston in 1844. The two novelists could have read twenty-five tightly argued pages on the Melvilles’ courtship in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. There I use familiar documents along with many family documents no one else has ever transcribed, read, and dated, and used. I worked it out. I knew what Melville had to have done in Boston. No, he was not drinking himself blind. 

      Dayswork misfires slightly several times. No, I never said Clarel is the best thing Melville ever wrote, but it’s true that when I get to part four I feel “‘edgy, vaguely dodgy and sore’ because ‘pretty soon there won’t be any more.’” But Dayswork chooses some issues well. One page shows me demolishing the argument for transcribing by your rhetorical agenda rather than learning to read your writer’s handwriting. The bonus the novelists did not know is that the unnamed self-promoting theorist is the one who always made fun of my hailing from Oklahoma. In my Bronco II I kept the Forebitter tape of “Harbo and Samuelsen,” the two young Norwegians who rowed across the Atlantic in 1896. A half mile down to the Pacific in the Bronco for my three-mile run, a half mile back, a 5 or 6 minutes ride for an 8 minute song, so usually home, waiting for the song to end. I played the song on days I was all but overwhelmed by Leyda’s project and Hayford’s projects and the piles of manuscripts I was transcribing (not to mention teaching every class originally). They quote me as saying that I listened and blubbered. Perhaps I am excessively emotional, but, yes, I wept at “the colors of Norway floating behind” and, yes, wept more at “they were not only brave but by God they could row.” The task I was part way through seemed like rowing across the Atlantic alone. The writers themselves became enthralled and devoted several pages to the young Norwegian heroes.

        You know my Melville Collection is already mainly at the Berkshire Athenaeum. A couple of pages in Dayswork review my “long history” with the Athenaeum, beginning in 1962 when I hitchhiked to Pittsfield from New York City. (Don’t try it yourself.) After I recover from An Okie’s Racial Reckonings I will get help in sending more boxes to Pittsfield.

        They devote four pages to what they see as a “triumphant feat of archival research,” celebrating the success of my long hunt for a Windsor, Vermont paper in November 1851. I was hunting on the chance—I thought, a near certainty--that it would describe a meeting in at which Melville gave Hawthorne his presentation copy of Moby-Dick, shortly before Hawthorne left the Berkshires. Decades ago, Hayford had been sure such a meeting had happened, and the great bookman Bill Reese also just knew, people being people, that it happened. The novelists capture my exultation when I held with shaking hands what I had longed for. They print this alone on one line: “‘Jesus,” he wrote in his diary, ‘my mind is wild.’” Later they say: “‘Wanted a drink’ he wrote in his dairy,” but in lieu “of a celebratory drink he called Hayford, then Maurice Sendak, and then went back to work.’” (I last drank any alcohol in 1986 when I got home from taking Jay Leyda on his last research trip and let myself face up to how advanced his Parkinson’s was.)

         I did not stop to read Dayswork but I kept dipping into it. The scattered episodes on me run from 1956 up into the 1990s. The passages on Lowell ought to have displayed his love of Melville, but they did not, so why is he here? The writers did not like my dissing Hardwick’s little book on Melville. For it she did no research at all and she lied about me in it, pulling me into a sexual fantasy of hers. It’s a trivial book which a reviewer in the New York Times called “brief but meaty”! Hardwick features in Dayswork as the modern Griselda, patient--but making sure readers know just how deeply she is suffering from Lowell’s mistreatment during his recurrent madness. Lowell’s reputation as a poet suffers the more she suffers.

        In the February 2020 Harper’s Helen Vendler accepts Hardwick’s self-portrait as Griselda, but nevertheless thinks Lowell’s reputation as a great writer is secure: “The passing of time makes the personal irrelevant.” I wish that were true, but Lowell is already disappearing from lists of great American poets. Go to Google for “The Best 20^th Century American Poets” and see. Despite Vendler’s optimism, I fear Hardwick may already have cost Lowell his high place in American literature. If only the writers had shown how much Lowell loved Melville!

        The writers of Daysworth read my blog (they mention one title, not credited to me, on page two!) so they must know I work on my own genealogy. Perhaps oddly, they do not mention my work on An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. They did not check Lowell and me for kinship. The only intermittently mad great poet in my family is Robert Traill Spence Lowell, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize. “Cal,” Lowell was called. Both Cal and I are Traills (and Balfours and Spences). We share grandparents, “William Traill of Westness” in the Orkneys and his wife Barbara Balfour, she from yet more ancient Orkney families. We share notable older ancestors such as James Baikie of Tankerness House (now the Orkney Museum). I think of myself as a Scot, and realizing that a great poet and I share such Orkney kinship is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the Orkneys, where a farmer’s pickaxe can reveal a Pictish tomb and where one morning after a storm a Viking village stood, open to the air? No wonder in his madness Cousin Cal announced that he was the King of Scotland! While reading my cousin’s poetry and pondering his tortured yet triumphant life, I rejoice in knowing he made a pilgrimage to the Orkneys to visit to the poet Charles Mackay Brown, who knew more about our Traill and Balfour ancestors than we ever did, or ever will.

        With luck, Dayswork, misandry or not, may prove a publicity boon for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. Their “novel” was still being talked about on November 13 when DeNeen L. Brown published a stunning article in the Washington Post: “Army Clears Buffalo Soldiers Century-Old Convictions, Blames Racism.” Alma and I had just put into final form my “One Bad Cop,” the chapter about my Cousin Lee Sparks whose racist pistol-whipping of black women and men caused the Houston riot. Other chapters are timely, and may become news again. Who knows?

        Any Depression Okie like me is now kin not to hundreds or thousands of other Americans but to millions, many more millions than when I started looking. There is an audience. Cousin Kevin built the baseball field and thousands of cars came rolling into Iowa. I have built my Reckonings with hundreds of names and hundreds of stories never told before. Perhaps many people will care.

        My disrespected Okies are Americans. None of us entered through Ellis Island. Why, few of us came to the United States. My own white folks were all here before there was a United States, and the Choctaws were already here many millennia before them. Neither of my parents, I remind you, was born in one of the American states. They were born in different Territories. That alienated heritage may go toward accounting for the trajectory of my career. In 1962, the two Columbia students were amused to think I had come to New York from the vague Northwest Territory. The truth is, I was from a Territory where facts mattered. They matter in this book. Yes, I hail from Oklahoma. Steinbeck said it. We are, after all, Goddamn Okies. Facts and families matter.

 

 

 

An oddity in DAYSWORK--the writers forget that Lowell ought to be here because he loved Melville and wrote about him.

 I'm saying they have no function for him except to denounce him for mistreating Elizabeth Hardwick. Now, Lowell had long bouts of madness, real howling madness, in between writing great poetry. What is he doing in this book if he never read Melville?

        Now Leyda, Hayford, and Sendak are dead. I loved all three and think of them differently but poignantly. 

    Hardwick, who died in 2007 at 95, had a successful later life. In Dayswork she is the modern Patient Griselda all the while making sure a host of impressionable woman know just how deeply she is suffering. The authors seem to have brought her and Lowell into Dayswork only to portray what they see as my slight mistreatment of her (I was polite but I despised her sloppy book) and Lowell’s monstrous abuse of her. What else is Lowell doing here? He is not a great poet, here. You would think, in a book so much about Melville, that they would mention the poetry, at least the early “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and the prose adaptation of Benito Cereno for the stage. Melville has vanished from their passages on Lowell. Here, Lowell is a madman who at the end can write poetry only by plagiarizing Hardwick’s noble letters to him. She said this to everyone and probably believed it herself. We all believed it, but see William Logan’s word-count in the New Criterion (February 2020). I reeled back several times from the force of reflexive misandry in the treatment of me, but mainly of Lowell. Maybe it’s best in Dayswork that Lowell is not identified as a reader of Melville (even in this book supposedly about Melville) and that he and I are never identified as kinsmen in this book about genealogy.

        Lowell was, I still believe, one of the greatest American poets of his century, worth mourning, but he does not appear on most modern lists of mid twentieth-century poets. Look at Google. Lowell is being erased or cancelled while I still cherish his memory. We have in common a love of Melville and we have in common, also, a grandfather, not a Boston Brahmin but William Traill of Westness in the Orkneys, and we descend from still more ancient Orkney families, the Spences and Balfours. As I have said, I think of myself as a Scot, and knowing that a great poet and I both have those Orkney heritages is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the harsh Orkneys, where a Viking village stands washed open to the air and a farmer’s pickaxe can open Pictish tombs? No wonder in his madness Lowell announced in a restaurant that he was the King of Scotland! While pondering my cousin’s tortured and triumphant life, I rejoice in knowing he made a pilgrimage to the Orkneys to visit to the poet Charles Mackay Brown, who knew more about our Traill and Balfour ancestors than we ever did, or ever will.

THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS AND THE ONE BAD COP WHO CAUSED THE 1917 HOUSTON RIOT

 

Copyright 2023 by Hershel Parker..14 November 2023

 

 

 

How One Bad Cop Caused the  “Largest Murder Trial in the History of the United States.”

Cousin Lee Sparks--The Mounted Policeman Who Hastened the End of the Buffalo Soldiers

Hershel Parker

 

“Largest Murder Trial in the History of the United States. Scene during Court Martial of 64 members of the 24th Infantry United States of America on trial for mutiny and murder of 17 people at Houston, Tex. Aug 23, 1917. Trial held in Gift Chapel Fort Sam Houston. Trial started --- Nov 1, 1917, Brig Genl . George K. Hunter presiding. Colonel J.A. Hull, Judge Advocate, Maj. D. V. Sulphin Asst.  Council for Defense, Major Harry H. Grier.  Prisoners guarded by 19th Infantry Company C, Capt. Carl J. Adler.” [I have slightly reordered and corrected the caption. The photograph is justly famous, and now in the public domain.]

 

        After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 the army chose to use Camp Logan, west of downtown Houston, to train soldiers for deployment abroad. Houston officials asked that only white troops be sent to the rigidly segregated town but the army arrogantly sent the 24th Infantry Regiment, part of the Buffalo Soldiers, black soldiers and white commanders. The black troops were all but imprisoned in Camp Logan. Any man going off base could not find a drinking fountain, could not eat, and was subjected to slurs ("nigger," always), threats, and violence. The Tampa Times on 6 September quoted the Houston Post: "The negroes, or many of them, came here with the memory of East St. Louis infuriating them. And they carried chips on their shoulders both for policemen and civilians."

       The army's decision is almost incomprehensible because it came so soon after the East St. Louis riot. There in the first days of July white mobs had attacked negroes who had come up from the South to look for jobs. On 3 July the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said "man-hunting mobs" had burned sixty homes already and were slaying "blacks by bullet and rope" as they fled. Even white women and children joined the "Blood Orgy as Flames spread to Business Sections." The Globe-Democrat headline on 5 July 1917 used enormous type: "100 NEGROES SHOT, BURNED, CLUBBED TO DEATH IN E. ST. LOUIS RACE WAR." The paper elaborated: "Shot, clubbed to death, roasted alive amid the ruins of their homes while blood-mad riflemen stood outside and send leaden missiles of death at each one who ventured to seek the uncertain safety of the open, 100 or more negroes are believed to have been killed by rioters in East St. Louis, Illinois, last night." White men, women, and children (the paper was emphatic on the children) had "surged madly through the streets from daybreak until after nightfall," all "participating in the hunt for negro lives—a hunt that took on greater proportions, perhaps, than any similar one that has been carried on in the United States since the days of the Ku Klux Klan."      This last comment is ignorant.       Hellish as the Klan was, it never incited a whole white population to attempt to kill every negro in a town. Look at the chapter on Tourgee and McGehee where atrocious but limited crimes are recorded. The early KKK was baleful, but something even more baleful happen in the United States under Jim Crow, after amnesty to KKK members was granted in North Carolina in 1873. Southern whites had not hated blacks, their slaves or other blacks, before the War. In the decades after 1865 many Southern whites began to hate blacks. Late in the 1880s, perhaps, or early in the 1900s, it seems to me, resentment after defeat in the Civil War and impoverishment of many whites had changed into controlled hatred, a new intermediate phase documented in the chapter on Dovey Costner, where the push in Bryant County was to drive all blacks out of particular towns, without killing them.

       Before 1911 in Oklahoma the true racial madness of white supremacy was obvious in the 10 November 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre. After 1911 came the East St. Louis massacre of 1917, the Houston Riot of 1917 and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the others, the Wilmington massacre, the East St. Louis massacre, and the Houston Riot were long minimized or even ignored. Recent histories of the violence in East St. Louis have not caught the national attention the way the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre did, however briefly, in 2019. The Wilmington massacre is still often overlooked, and the Houston Riot also has waited until recently to received attention in books and film. In 2023 with the abolition of American history being led by the governor of Florida and hundreds of others around the country, with self-proclaimed white supremacists almost commonplace, I put this true story on record.

        Here I offer dry facts, as given in the first years after the riot. On 23 August, seventeen people were killed. On 29 August, one hundred fifty of the Black soldiers were brought to El Paso and put in the military prison at Fort Bliss. Thirty-four were already charged with murder. Thirteen negroes, convicted by court-martial, were hanged. In December 1917 thirty-nine soldiers were sent to prison at Leavenworth. On 19 June 1920 the San Antonio Light recorded the attempts to free the imprisoned soldiers: “petition for release of negro prisoners made by attorneys.  Thirty-nine Are Serving Sentences Imposed by Court-martial.”

        This was part of the petition: “In this statement it was asserted that negro soldiers of the Third Battalion of the 24^th Infantry, from the time of their arrival in Houston, July 28, 1917, to the day of the riot, August 23, 1917, had repeatedly been molested and assaulted by white civilian policemen of the city of Houston, and that the day of the outbreak Lee Sparks, a white patrolman, had engaged in an altercation with Corporal [Charles] Baltimore, a negro soldier of the 24^th Infantry, who was a member of the military police and that the while civilian policemen had beaten the negro military policemen over the head repeatedly with the butt of a revolver, and finally lodged the negro in jail."

        In February 1918 the NAACP petitioned President Wilson with 12,000 signatures protesting executions of the imprisoned soldiers without personal review of the President. On 31 August 1918 President Wilson retained the death penalty already imposed on 6 of 16 soldiers and commuted the rest to life imprisonment, the fate of all the 63 still living soldiers who had been convicted. The Pittsburgh Courier on 30 April 1938 looked back at the NAACP’s' long continued and steady campaign for the pardon or parole of the men whom colored people regard as martyrs, but whom the law branded as rioters. The Association never ceased activity with each new President and Secretary of War.

        As I first learned on a telephone call with Angela Holder, some of these soldiers died or were pardoned in the 1920s and 1930s before the last prisoner was released in 1938. In this chapter I give no history of the men hanged and imprisoned or their early tormentors, for in word and deed Houstonians had been displaying arrogant racism toward the newly arrived black soldiers. Instead, I focus on the Texas policeman, Lee Sparks, named in the 1920 Petition, whose behavior destroyed so many lives and tarnished the reputation of the Buffalo Soldiers.

        All the suffering of 23 August 1917, suffering that endured for decades afterwards up to the present, occurred as a direct consequence of the brutal racism of one man, my cousin Lee Sparks, a Houston Mounted Policeman. He had not grown up around blacks and now hated blacks. One reason he gave for pistol-whipping sturdy Black Sergeant Baltimore and then shooting him was that he "wasn’t going to wrestle with the big negro.” He did not want to touch a black man's skin with his white hands.

        Lee Sparks was born on the last day of 1877 in Wilson County, Texas. He died on 9 January 1934 in Houston. He was descended like me from the brave old Tory Solomon Sparks. Find A Grave says that Lee Sparks, “never married and made his living as a Texas Ranger and farmer.” Farmer is doubtful, and I have yet to confirm that he had been a Texas Ranger. His father, John C. Sparks, was not the John C. Sparks who had some notoriety as a member of the Frontier Battalion. Lee’s father was a Georgia-born farmer, 28 in the 1880 census, with a 24 year old wife born in Texas. Lee's grandfather, George Washington Sparks, also a Georgian, was 64, and living with his son, but no longer the head of the family. Lee was officially Louis E. (E. likely from his mother Catherine’s last name, Edmiston). The only known description of Sparks is from his draft registration card on 12 September 1918. At almost 40, he was slender, tall, with brown eyes and dark brown hair. One more detail confirms that his build was slight: the Houston Post on 27 April 1921 reported Sparks’s saying that “he wore a size 15 shirt.”

        The Chronicle for 1 June 1913 listed changes in the Houston police force: Lee Sparks and Sam Gates had become "mounted officers." The next item? "Dave Burney, colored, is appointed a partner of Ned Jones, making two colored policemen." Three and a half years later, on 29 November 1916, the headline in the Houston Post was “negro with knife shot by policeman making arrest. Tom Farrington in Hospital Following an Encounter With Mounted Officer Sparks.” Lee Sparks, then on duty, had supposedly received a call saying that “a negro was trying to kill some one.” What follows is from Sparks’s own account: “Hastening to the scene Officer Sparks started to arrest the negro who was causing the trouble. Farrington, according to the officer, resisted and in the melee drew a knife, cutting a button off the officer’s blouse, at the same time trying to choke him. The officer, finding his life in danger, drew his pistol and fired, several shots taking effect in the negro’s body.” Then Westheimer’s ambulance carried the negro to the infirmary--probably St. Joseph’s, which accommodated black, white, and Mexican patients. “Several shots” into Tom Farrington’s body suggests at least that Sparks liked to be thorough in his job. Perhaps no one reproached Sparks for putting multiple shots into Farrington, but half a year later in his dealings with the “general public” he had had done something that deserved sharp criticism and a severe punishment (suspension without pay?).

        The Houston Post on 28 June 1917 printed an ominous little notice: “two officers suspended.” These were Lee Sparks and J. H. Walsh, who may have misbehaved together or separately but were punished differently: “The members of the police department must have the respect of the general public, and in turn the officers must not do anything that would subject them to criticism,” remarked Superintendent of Police Brock Wednesday afternoon” (the 27^th), “as he announced the suspension for 10 days of Officers Lee Sparks and J. H. Walsh, the latter for 15 days.”

        The Houston Chronicle for 28 June was slightly more specific: "Lee Sparks, policeman, was suspended from the force yesterday afternoon by Superintendent Brock for 10 days and Policeman J. H. Walsh was suspended for 15 days. The suspensions came about because of rough actions of the two officers in a public place. One of them talked roughly to a citizen and the other had trouble with another officer in public. 'The members of the police department must always act in a manner to retain the respect of the public,' Superintendent Brock said in suspending them."

        Lee Sparks continued to show contempt for the “general public,” particularly any negro. What he did on the late morning of 23 August 1917 could have been forgotten, just a routine episode of police brutality, verbal and  physical. Maybe a report of a negro craps game had come into police or maybe Sparks and his partner R. H. Daniels came upon the game in progress at San Felipe and Wilson. The gamblers were negro boys, not grown men. One ran into a nearby house where a negro woman lived.  After he barged in and questioned her, Sparks “slapped her in the face,” according to Kneeland Snow’s testimony as recorded in the Post of 2 November 1917. What that means, is that Sparks struck her across the face with his pistol--he "pistol-whipped" her and arrested her.  (Habitually he stuck with the butt of his pistol, though you might think the barrel would be a risky way to grip a gun.) Private Alonzo Edwards, company L., 24^th infantry (newly moved to Camp Logan and recklessly having left the base), had reportedly already started day-drinking. Edwards tried to protect her (“to interfere”) “and as a result was promptly beaten up and placed under arrest by Sparks.” Beaten up includes being pistol-whipped. When Corporal Charles Baltimore challenged Sparks for the condition Edwards was in, Sparks pistol-whipped him. Baltimore fled into a house while Sparks was shooting at him (just a shot to the ground to stop him, Sparks said, but others counted more than one). Baltimore hid under a bed but Sparks forced him to come out, pistol-whipped him again “twice over the head,” and arrested him and hauled him to the city jail. In another version (Houston Post on 30 August)

Baltimore wants to know who had hit Edward. "Sparks answered him to the effect, 'I don't report to any negro.' Baltimore said, "By God I'm on this beat and I have a right to know,' Sparks said that Baltimore was acting so 'ugly that he hit him once with the butt of his revolver and then arrested him."

        The New York Times on 25 August printed what Private Leroy Pinkett, Company J of the 24^th Regiment, called “a complete story of the trouble”:

         “Yesterday [the 23^rd] about 3 P. M.,” he said, “we heard that Corporal Baltimore of our company had been shot by special officers, (white officers who ride horses.) All the boys said, ‘Let’s go get the man that shot Baltimore.’ It was getting late then, and we stood retreat at 6 o’clock, and then I heard Sergeant Henry of our company say: ‘Well, don’t stand around like that. If you are going to do anything, go ahead and do it.’

        "After that I saw some of the boys slip over to Company K, and I heard them say they had stolen the ammunition. Then Captain Snow called the men out in line. He asked what we were doing, and ordered a search made for the ammunition, and also ordered that our rifles be taken up. Another Sergeant, I forget his name, took up our rifles from our tents. In this same talk Captain Snow told us that Baltimore was not in the wrong; that the policeman was in the wrong. I heard him say that. A big fellow in our company named Frank Johnson, then came running down the company street, hollering ‘Get your rifles, boys.’

        “We all made a rush then for the supply camp, and got our rifles, and we went to a large ammunition box and got our ammunition."

        Captain Snow was right--the mounted policeman Lee Sparks “was in the wrong.” But what followed was murderous and suicidal.

        Newspaper men all around the country knew that the behavior of Lee Sparks had caused the riots although there was a noticeable effort to avoid blaming a policeman. [Alma I want to leave these short paragraph]

        On 8 September 1917 the Chicago Tribune headlined: “POLICE OFFICER IS INDICTED FOR HOUSTON RIOTS.” [Alma, these capitals are too big—please help!]

        In Texas the Fort Worth Record-Telegram on the 8^th hedged in the headlines (“HOUSTON POLICEMAN WHO PARTLY STARTED TROUBLE IS INDICTED”) and hedged again in the text (Sparks’s assault on “Sergeant Baltimore” is "supposed to have been the incentive which caused the troops to mutiny”). 

        The Portage, Wisconsin Register in the subhead said: “Police Officer, Whose Alleged Assault on Negro Sergeant Caused Trouble, Faces Two Charges.”

        The Los Angeles Times on the 10^th started with “Accusation. BLAME POLICEMAN FOR NEGRO RIOTS,” but reduced the pistol-whipping of Baltimore to “Alleged Brutal Assault Upon Colored Corporal said to Have Precipitated Clash.”

        The Nashville Globe on the 14^th in headlined: “MOUNTED OFFICER SPARKS STARTED NEGRO RAID.”        

        C. L. Brock, the Chief of Police, before the riot called Sparks into his office (said the Post on 1 September). Sparks and his partner Rufe (Rufus) Daniels (hours before he was separated from Sparks and killed in the riot) made a “verbal statement” about Sparks’s beating of Baltimore, and Brock told Sparks “he would be suspended in the morning.” Defiantly, “Sparks said he could not afford to be suspended, that he had been suspended before and Brock told him he would wait until he investigated the matter. Sparks then spoke strongly about Brock. As for suspension, he “would rather work than lay around.” At some point in Sparks's rant Detective E. F. Daugherty repeats what he remembers: "He [Sparks] declared, “I don’t respect him as chief. I got a little mad and told him a little of my mind. I told him I didn’t think he would back me up, that he didn’t show it that far. I told the chief I wasn’t getting a square deal and I didn’t think he ought to suspend me when I was doing my duty.” He had absolutely done nothing wrong: “I arrested the negro woman for abusive language. While I was waiting for the wagon Edwards came up with about 30 negroes following him and said he wanted the woman. I said he couldn’t have her. He said he was going to have her anyway and reached over. I hit him over the head three or four times till he got his heart right and sat down.” 

        Detective Daugherty had taken down Baltimore’s statement on the typewriter in Brock’s office. Baltimore had claimed that when he asked why Sparks had beaten his companion, “Sparks told him he was not in the habit of reporting to a negro.” The typed report said that Spark had hit him [Baltimore] with his pistol then he ran as Sparks fired three shots at him. Sparks's claiming to have pistol-whipped Baltimore only once brought the question, why only once?  Sparks replied that “he wasn’t going to wrestle with the big negro.” Daugherty said that later Brock and Sparks were in the office alone, “and that when Sparks came out he said something to the effect that he wasn’t getting a square deal. He also said that “any man who would stick up for a negro was no better than a negro himself.” Sparks muttered something which Daugherty may have misunderstood: “as he went out the door he continued that if that wasn’t enough he would give him (Brock) the rest of it,” which Daugherty took as a threat to Brock.

        To the citizens and the military investigating committee on Friday, 31 August, Sparks declared that he “did not apologize to Superintendent of Police Brock” in the day of the riot; in fact, “Officer Sparks was very emphatic in his denial and requested that it be published.” According to the Post on the 2^nd of September, on the day before. Sparks had received a written notice from Superintendent Brock suspending him from duty starting the next day, Sunday: “Officer Lee Sparks: You are hereby notified that you are temporarily suspended, pending the investigation now being carried on by the citizens committee and the grand jury.” Sparks later said he had continued work as if not suspended. The Post on 7 September was copied later that day by the Waco Times Herald: "Houston Policeman Indicted in Connection with Negro Riots. Lee Sparks, the Houston police officer whose assault on Sergeant Baltimore, a negro trooper of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, is supposed to have been the incentive that caused the troops to mutiny on August 23, and kill fifteen Houston citizens and wound twenty-two others, was today indicted by the Harris county grand jury on two charges." The assault was against Baltimore, now dead in the riot: “The beating of Baltimore and several shots which are said to have been fired at him, has been the subject of much inquiry by the civilian investigating committee and also by the military committee. It has resulted in Sparks’ suspension from the force, pending further inquiry.”

        In the second indictment Lee was "charged with murder, in connection with the death of Wallace Williams, a negro civilian, who was shot to death on the Sunday following the riot."         On 8 September the Post gave more details. Sparks and two other policemen had gone to a Dallas Avenue house “on a report that gambling was in progress among negroes.” The negroes were told to stay in the house but “Williams attempted to make a break for liberty” and a policeman put “a bullet in the back” which killed him. Sparks was reinstated. On 12 September he was freed on a $5000 bond--but, the court emphasized, only temporarily.

The Houston Chronicle on 16 October: "Lee Sparks was at one time denied bond by Judge Robison, but granted bond of $7500 on an appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals." The jurors on the charge of the murder of Wallace (“Snow”) Williams retired to debate at 9:15 at night on Monday 15 October but milled in the room a moment rather than sitting down. The trial started at 9 a.m. and wore on almost till 5 but the headline in the Post the next day was “Sparks Acquitted in Less Than a Minute.” The jurors had hardly all “entered the jury room before it was announced that they were ready to return with their findings.” They bought the defense story “that the fatal shot was fired by some one else and that Sparks was a block away at the time.” The Chronicle commented: "Officer Sparks' mother and sister sat with him in the courtroom. He is unmarried." What could his mother have been thinking?

        No longer a mounted policeman, Sparks was promptly hired (ironically) “as a guard at Camp Logan, being employed by the American Construction company. He held some sort of commission as a deputy sheriff.” Some workers at the Post apparently forgot Sparks’s name fast enough because his history is not mentioned in the 9 March 1918 article “Negro Wounded in Duel With Officer”: “As a result of pistol duel between Special Officer Lee Sparks and two negroes in the International and Great Northern yards early Friday morning P. H. Hill, negro, is in a serious condition at St. Joseph’s infirmary. Sparks was unhurt. The other negro escaped.” All the information came from Sparks. “According to Officer Sparks, the negroes were engaged in taking the brass car journals off of oil cars belonging to the Texas company at the unloading rack near the plant of the Magnolia Cotton Oil company, when he surprised them while making his rounds as watchman for the company.” This suggests that Sparks at this time was hired by the Magnolia company. Sparks said that the two negroes fled and opened fire on him. “He succeeded in bringing down Hill,” having found his pistol, “but the other negro made good his escape.” Sparks had been “detailed to catch” whoever had been stealing the brass. “Tom Harris of the district attorney’s office took what was supposed to be a dying statement from the negro, in which the negro admitted they were engaged in stealing brass, and that they fired at Sparks.”

        Forty on the last day of 1917, the tall, slender Sparks was in the news again. The headline in the Post on 14 November 1918 was “INJURED IN RUNAWAY.” This time the subject was only “Former Policeman Lee Sparks.” Was he altogether unemployed? Here is what happened. He “received a broken arm, a scratched face, and other injuries when he was thrown from a wagon by a runaway team in the 1700 block on Franklin avenue, shortly before 2 o’clock Wednesday afternoon” (the 13^th). “The team started from a point in the Second ward and ran more than a dozen blocks when they ran into a fence, throwing Mr. Sparks to the ground. He was taken to his home and a physician summoned. His injuries are not regarded as serious.” Now, strong men approaching 40 may sometimes lose control of a team they are driving, but judging from what comes later, had Cousin Lee been day-drinking?

        Sparks may have known he was in new trouble the first week of January 1921, as I explain later. On 17 February 1921 the Post reported that in Harris and Fort Bend counties many suspects had been arrested and freed in the aftermath of the 14 February robbery at the Blue Ridge State Bank in which the robbers killed the cashier, R. L. Kirby. Four men were asleep in the woods when arrested on the 15^th near Stafford and Blue Ridge, and were brought to Houston Wednesday afternoon by Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks and three others.  The Chief decided they were merely boon companions, over-excited after participating in the “systematic” search in Blue Ridge, after which they had the idea of going hunting in the woods and catching some robbers.

        The news on 17 February  left it unclear where Lee Sparks was employed as a deputy sheriff, but on the 19^th the Post identified him as “Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks of Blue Ridge.” He had lost his job before 14 November 1918 and had been hired in Blue Ridge despite his appalling record in Houston. Deputy Sheriff “Doc” Sammon (or Samon) of Blue Ridge had first picked up the trail of Kirby’s murderer “and tenacious followed it until the man was run down” at a hotel near “the busiest corner of Houston.” In the assault on the hotel room Deputy Samon was “accompanied by Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks of Blue Ridge, Sheriff Henry Collins of Fort Bend county, and City Detectives Rainey and Heard of Houston.” Collins (and perhaps the deputies from Blue Ridge) drove the prisoner and his female accomplice to Richmond but covertly turned back to Houston to prevent a lynching, “making a wide detour around Blue Ridge.”

        That was February 1921. On 6 March 1921 the Post announced “2 Indicted on Charge Of Operating Still”: “Lee Sparks, former member of the Houston police force, and J. H. Brown, formerly a peace officer at Blue Ridge, were jointly indicted Saturday by the federal grand jury on a charge of unlawfully manufacturing whisky, possessing whisky and having a still. The still is said to have been found some time ago under operation in the house where Sparks and Brown lived.” Also on the 6^th the Austin American-Statesman added this information: “Their farm near Alameda was raided Jan. 5. Both are out on bond and it is expected they will be tried at this term.” The Galveston Daily News on 11 March had more: “Sparks and Brown both took the stand and denied knowledge of the still that prohibition officers are said to have found. A raid was made Jan. 4, after which C. C. White, S. M. Jester, prohibition agents, and Hugh Graham, city detective, testified they found a still.

        Sparks denied knowledge of the still being there. Sparks testified that the room had been locked since November. He blamed an old man and stated he had discharged him and hired Brown the day preceding the raid.” Strangely, no one believed him. The next day the Galveston paper had the verdict: “A fine of $1,000 was given Lee Sparks, deputy sheriff of Fort Bend County, this morning soon after the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Sparks on charge of possessing a still and moonshine whisky. J. H. Brown, who was employed on Sparks’ farm at the time the place was raided, was declared not guilty by the jury and released. Sparks was acquitted of the charge of manufacturing liquor and of the charge of conspiracy.”  He was given two days to pay the fine.

        While Cousin Lee was leading his sordid life as a free man, negroes who had not been hanged were still imprisoned, except for Stewart W. Phillips, temporarily. Sentenced to life, Phillips escaped from Leavenworth and “was a free but hunted man for five years,” the Pittsburgh Courier said on 30 April 1938: “He finally gave himself up and returned to prison so he could win a parole and enjoy his freedom in peace. His escape counted against his record and therefore he was the last to be released.” The Los Angeles California Eagle on 5 May 1938 noted this: “Mr. Phillips received executive clemency from President Roosevelt, and an unconditional release, and expresses himself as deeply indebted to the NAACP for their efforts in his behalf.”

        Phillips offered a restrained picture of what life in Leavenworth had been like: “According to Phillips, segregation is rampant in Leavenworth prison. Negroes are given the most grueling and unpleasant work in the shoe factory. In the furniture shop Negroes can only be porters, and the same is true to the other trade shops. Everything which carries much in the way of salary is kept from the Negro, and if he is accepted in say the shoe factory, he is kept at one job and not given the chance to learn the entire process of the trade. None of this is conducive to a happy adjustment of a man, and really presents a grave situation.” The “martyrs” were not tortured, not pistol-whipped daily, but they experienced daily humiliation in stultifying work. These men had been proud Buffalo Soldiers.

        Lee Sparks gave many members of the NAACP and families of the imprisoned soldiers work to do, year after year through the twenties and far into the 1930s. Meanwhile, Sparks was not doing much to stay in good health, and a fair assumption is that a moonshiner might do more than sample his product, when he could. However, Sparks lived on without any more conspicuous mishaps. Early on 9 January 1934, just turned 56, a heavy smoker, he died in a Houston hospital of emphysema, probably due to “cancer of lung tissue.” There was no autopsy. For at least two decades he had shamed his family name. If we could joke about it at a time when white supremacy is again openly proclaimed, we could say that Sparks gave white supremacy a bad name. Cousin Lee's dictum was, “any man who would stick up for a negro was no better than a negro himself.” Well, any man who would stick up for a man like Lee Sparks was no better than Lee Sparks himself.

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